Reading Victorian Children's "Sunday Books" as Hybrid Genre

Abstract: This article shows how some nineteenth-century didactic texts for children, including works by Mary Martha Sherwood, Charlotte Yonge, and "Miss Jackson," draw from multiple genres, combining script-like dialogue sections with narration or inserting short stories, poetry, and prayer within a larger frame narrative. In novels for children such as Countess Kate, The Stokesley Secret , and Langley School , Yonge borrowed and adapted formal aspects from earlier didactic works. Similarly, Yonge's fellow Tractarian author Miss Jackson published a popular series of religious tracts that embedded instructional dialogue and short stories within a frame narrative focused on a fictional Sunday school class. In texts intended to instruct as well as entertain, such hybrid elements engaged child readers in multiple modes, inviting them to read more actively.